COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The outgoing head of Ohio's troubled teachers retirement system said that she is leaving the fund in strong fiscal condition, despite the turmoil at the top that her successor will inherit.
In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Acting Executive Director and CFO Lynn Hoover said that the $94 billion State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio's returns over the short term, middle term and long term remain within the top 10% of peer funds around the country.
“We’ve delivered,” said Hoover, who has seen her investment staff denied performance bonuses as part of recent tensions. She retires Sunday after 31 years at STRS, one of the nation’s oldest and largest public pension funds. Its more than 500,000 members include active and inactive public school teachers and retirees.
That doesn't mean the next interim director, Aaron Hood, doesn't have a big job ahead of him, she said.
The U.S. Army veteran and seasoned asset management professional came on board this month and will help lead a nationwide search for a new permanent director to replace Bill Neville, who was let go in September after being placed on leave amid misconduct allegations. Hood also must fill Hoover's role as chief financial officer, hire for a vacancy coming in March for a chief investment officer and find a new head of internal audit.
The top priority "is to get those filled and to get highly capable people in here that can continue this great legacy,” Hoover said.
The staff departures come amid years of tension that boiled over this spring. Would-be reformers on the STRS board took aim at the fund’s internal operations and investment decisions after retirees were angered when the previous board cut their cost-of-living adjustment and then eliminated it for five years to help stabilize the fund. Many have remained dissatisfied with the 3% adjustment they got in 2023 and the 1% adjustment they got in 2024.
In May, Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced that he had come into possession of an anonymous 14-page memo and other documents containing “disturbing allegations” about the STRS board and was handing them over to authorities. Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost launched an investigation the next day into what he called the fund’s “susceptibility to a hostile takeover by private interests.” The probe is still ongoing, and lawmakers have since begun considering a proposal to remove elected members from the board.
Yost followed up the launch of his investigation with a lawsuit seeking to unseat two of the reform-minded board members. One of those members Rudy Fichtenbaum, became board chair. The other, Wade Steen, has since left the board. He also filed suit against two other former board members in October, alleging they participated in a “civil conspiracy” that prevented him from uncovering the fund's defects.
When the same whistleblower attorney who examined STRS' performance metrics also turned up in Minnesota to do something similar, The Blade of Toledo reported that records there showed Hoover and others communicated with their counterparts “to undermine the impact of the investigation.”
Hoover said the communications were “par for the course and normal protocol.”
“They simply reached out to us and said would you be able to get on the phone call with us,” she said, calling it “pretty typical” that peer organizations will exchange information on best practices and how they've handled similar issues.
Hoover said she is proud of the staff's professionalism amid all the controversy in recent years.
“The staff have stayed really aligned with the mission and laser-focused on protecting and providing member security," she said.
STRS has paid out more than $4 billion in positive benefit changes to active teachers and retirees over the past three and a half years, she said, which she attributed to sound investment strategies and strong markets.
“Our fund is in a situation where we pay out more in benefits than what we receive in contributions, so the investment returns are critical over the long term,” she said.
At the same time, she acknowledged that members have had to bear the brunt of pension reform changes and high inflation and “it's been hard.”
Hoover said members should be happy that the fund is now reviewing cost-of-living-adjustments annually. She added that STRS is also fighting to increase employers' contributions into the fund. The percentage they pay in Ohio has remained the same for 40 years, she said.
STRS also has hired the global commercial real estate firm CBRE to analyze usage needs for its buildings, which are capital not investment assets, into the future and continues to lobby for fair school funding, she said.
The retirement system is also keeping a close eye on the rollout of Ohio's new universal voucher system, which is open to both public and private school students.
“To the extent that it starts taking kids out of public education, thereby reducing teachers, thereby reducing payroll, that does affect our system,” she said. “We want to support public education, and the public pension model is so valuable for the teacher. They've served and worked and taught our kids and, when they retire, they should have a dependable, reliable, secure monthly pension until they die.”
Acting Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer Lynn Hoover poses in her office at the headquarters of the State Teachers Retirement System in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday, Nov. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Julie Carr Smyth)
Acting Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer Lynn Hoover poses in her office at the headquarters of the State Teachers Retirement System in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday, Nov. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Julie Carr Smyth)
Acting Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer Lynn Hoover poses in her office at the headquarters of the State Teachers Retirement System in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday, Nov. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Julie Carr Smyth)
PARIS (AP) — The head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service said Friday that Russia is conducting a “staggeringly reckless” sabotage campaign against Ukraine's Western allies, and that his spies are working to stop the consequences from spiraling out of control.
And in a message aimed in part at U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump, MI6 chief Richard Moore said that Russian victory in Ukraine would threaten American, as well as European, security.
Moore said his agency and its French counterpart were working together to a dangerous escalation by “calibrating the risk and informing the decisions of our respective governments” in response to President Vladimir Putin’s “mix of bluster and aggression.”
“We have recently uncovered a staggeringly reckless campaign of Russian sabotage in Europe, even as Putin and his acolytes resort to nuclear saber-rattling, to sow fear about the consequences of aiding Ukraine,” Moore said during a speech to diplomats and intelligence officials in France.
“Such activity and rhetoric is dangerous and beyond irresponsible,” he said.
Moore spoke alongside Nicolas Lerner, head of France’s external intelligence agency, the DGSE at an event marking 120 years of the Entente Cordiale, a pact between Britain and France that bound the age-old rivals together as military and diplomatic allies.
Western security officials suspect that Russian intelligence is trying to destabilize Ukraine’s allies through disinformation, sabotage and arson.
Moscow has been linked by Western officials to several planned attacks in Europe, including an alleged plot to burn down Ukrainian-owned businesses in London, and to incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes. In July one caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another ignited in a warehouse in England.
Lerner agreed that “the collective security of the whole of Europe is at stake” in Ukraine. He said Britain’s experience tackling Russia in the wake of recent attacks like the 2018 Salisbury Novichok poisoning of a former Russian spy, was invaluable to French intelligence seeking to defuse Russian actions.
Britain and France have been among Ukrainian allies most willing to allow Kyiv to use weapons they supply – especially missiles known as Scalp in France and Storm Shadow in Britain – to hit targets inside Russia. The Biden administration recently eased its long-held opposition to U.S.-made missiles being used to strike Russia. Ukraine said last week it had used the American ATACM missiles to target Russia for the first time in the war.
Since then, Putin has lowered the official threshold for Russia’s use of its nuclear weapons, and Russia has pounded Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with hundreds of missiles and drones, in what Putin said was a response to the firing of the American missiles against Russian soil. Russia also fired a new intermediate-range ballistic missile, called Oreshnik, and Putin threatened to use it against “decision-making centers” in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.
In a warning to allies wavering in support for Ukraine, Moore said that “the cost of supporting Ukraine is well-known, but the cost of not doing so would be infinitely higher.”
Trump has criticized the billions the Biden administration has spent in supporting Ukraine and has said he could end the war in 24 hours — comments that appear to suggest he would press Ukraine to surrender territory that Russia now occupies.
“If Putin is allowed to succeed in reducing Ukraine to a vassal state, he will not stop there," Moore said. "Our security — British, French, European and trans-Atlantic — will be jeopardized.”
He said that if Russia wins, Iran and China — which so far support Moscow as “a transaction" — would draw closer to Russia.
“If Putin succeeds, China would weigh the implications, North Korea would be emboldened and Iran would become yet more dangerous,” Moore said.
Some European officials worry about what Trump's “America first” agenda means for trans-Atlantic relations, but Moore — whose name has been mentioned as a possible choice for U.K. ambassador to Washington — said he was confident the bond was strong.
“For decades the U.S.-U.K. intelligence alliance has made our societies safer,” he said. “I worked successfully with the first Trump administration to advance our shared security and look forward to doing so again.”
This photo provided by British Embassy Paris, Richard Moore, the Chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, speaks at the British Embassy in Paris on Friday, Nov. 29, 2024. (British Embassy Paris via AP)
FILE - Richard Moore, the Chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, answers questions at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London, on Nov. 30, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)